Vertical taskbars and operating systems and desktops, etc.

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Liam Proven wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>The free demo version of BeOS is here:

>https://archiveos.org/beos/

>Its successor, Zeta, effectively BeOS 6, is harder to find as there
>was no free version.
>
>This might work:
>
>https://archive.org/details/archiveorg_malenki_Zeta
>
>Zeta was from 2007 or so. Should work on roughly 10YO hardware.
>
>It's deeply multithreaded and really wants lots of CPU cores. A
>desktop is more likely to give a good experience than a laptop, as it
>may not work well with power management, wifi etc.

All of these are on my ToDo list. I'll have to go digging in the back
of one of my closets for that old laptop for the first two.

>> I still feel that they're each doing it differently, even if the
>> basic underlying structure is the same, and I'm glad for the
>> choices. The thing I dislike the most, as a consumer of anything
>> at all, is being cornered into one choice or into a small sampling
>> of choices with none of them being appealing.  
>
>It's like having gone from a whole menu to 6 different types of
>beefburger and nothing but beefburger.
>
>I mean, I don't mind a burger now and then, but if I could eat
>nothing else but burgers, I don't know if I could face living.
>
>The taskbar-and-start-menu thing _is_ the desktop now.
>
>GNOME and Unity mucked around a bit because they were scared of an
>MS lawsuit:
>
>https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
>
>They aren't beefburgers any more.
>
>But they are both sandwiches with bread around a beef filling.
>
>I want stir-fry, I want curry, I want pasta, I want a biryani, I want
>tagine with couscous.
>
>I want stuff that is totally different and in no way resembles
>filling between or on top of bread.
>
>Why? Because no matter how good it is, there is more to life.

I just want a perfect beefburger that's made exactly the way I like
it.

>Every smartphone has a radically different UI which is nothing like
>the Windows model. And yet virtually everyone who uses a PC also uses
>a phone with no context-switching impedance.

Oh, there was definitely an adjustment period where we had to learn
to tap, double-tap, touch + drag, long touch, side-swipe, pinch,
unpinch, and, most importantly, how to recover when our ear
accidentally turned on airplane mode in the middle of a conversation.

>We are _all_ mentally flexible enough to do this. We just got lazy.
>
>30y ago the world had a hundred types of restaurant. Now, the choice
>is Burger King vs Mc Donald's vs occasionally a gourmet fancy burger.
>
>I am not OK with that.

You might want to go exploring a bit more deeply in your area, and if
all you find is Burger Kings and McDonald's, then you'll want to
venture a bit further out. There are all kinds of interesting
restaurants out there.

>> I took a quick look at it and it's very similar to the other basic
>> offerings, but I still feel that's a good thing. You never know
>> which of them will tweak one or two things to make their offering
>> absolutely perfect for you.  
>
>Not really. No taskbar as such. No start menu as such. It's as
>different as Unity or GNOME 3.

This is Budgie we're talking about, right? Ubuntu Budgie has a start
menu and a task bar (what I call a panel) at the top. It also has a
dock on the left.

I just messed around with it a bit more while looking at it again to
make sure we were talking about the same thing and it turns out you
can't use "Copy to..." or "Move to..." from the desktop, but you can
from anywhere else and also to the desktop. Interesting.

>What annoys me is that they are so lacking in imagination, they
>rewrote from scratch something you could build out of Xfce in 10min.

I'd say the annoying thing is that they changed a few things just to
be different, I guess, and they disrupt the work-flow for anyone
who's used to a traditional way of doing things. For instance, Save
is usually an icon on the left side of the toolbar or a menu entry
inside the furthest left menu in most desktops (at least ones I've
used). In this case, they made it a text entry toward the right side
of the toolbar, which is not where I'd go looking for it.

They also put the icon you click to quit an application on the left,
which is something I also feel disrupts the traditional work-flow.

I'm sure there's more, but haven't rooted around deeply enough to find
out.

>What a huge waste of effort.

They may yet mature into something appealing.

>> I'm not at all a fan of Mac OS X. I've never used it,  
>
>Hang on, hang on.
>
>You can't say you don't like something you've never tried!

I can tell, just by looking at it, that it would annoy me unless I
had the power to configure it to undo the things I can see that I'd
instantly dislike about it.

>> but the placement of the icons on the title bar,  
>
>What? You mean window buttons? They're the same as Unity.

Yes, and Unity is horrendous, too. I never used it and never would.

I'm going to use this image as a reference for what I see in Mac OS
X:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:Leopard_Desktop.png

When I mentioned the placement of the icons on the title bar, I was
referring to the red, yellow, and green icons in the upper left
corner of the open window in that screenshot. I assume those are the
window controls for minimizing, maximizing, and closing it. I would
find having them on the left disorienting and would rather have them
on the right.

>> the fact that the menu items are up in the panel,  

>What? It doesn't have "panels". And the menu bar being up there is
>from 1984 and is the most tried-and-tested GUI design in the world.
>Nothing older survives.
>
>I'm not saying it should be to anyone's taste, but it _works_.

Using the same image from the Wikipedia link above:

The menu bar, as you call it, is the thing at the top that looks like
a panel to me. At any rate, every program you open has its menu items
up in that menu bar/panel. I find that disorienting and would rather
have them at the top of the actual program window.

>Please, *PLEASE* try something that isn't a damned beefburger! You
>have to get out there and live!

You do and others might, but I really don't. I'm content with the
traditional desktop and am only unhappy with it when developers
decide to change it for change's sake or for some other reason.

>> and the presence of the dock are enough to send
>> me off in another direction. None of that is my style.  
>
>Nothing wrong with docks. The MS taskbar is a modified dock.

I find it visually disturbing (and  a waste of screen real estate)
that it doesn't go the full length/width of the screen. I also don't
like the look of a dock on the same screen as a panel/menu bar. From
a design perspective, I'd choose one or the other and not a mixture.
It's also excessively (or unnecessarily) bulky.

>Again you're saying you won't try a plate of spaghetti because it's
>not in a bun.

I never said I wouldn't try Mac OS X. I'd be happy to try it. What I
said was that its appearance is enough to tell me that I wouldn't
want it. If all of that (and anything else it might do that I would
find disruptive) can be customized to present what I consider to be a
traditional desktop with traditional desktop behavior, then I might
even consider it for more than just a quick trial, but I suspect
that's not the case.

>> It was a few years ago. You'd have to grab older versions of XFCE
>> to see it. It had what looked like a desktop, but you couldn't
>> create or put folders or files on it. When we contacted the
>> developers to ask about it, they said they considered that a
>> feature, so we thought it was hopeless to expect it ever to
>> change. It's nice to see that they've rethought or revisited
>> that.  
>
>All I can say is that I have been evaluating both for well over a
>decade and a half and I have never seen what you describe.

You might not have tested it the way we did. It wasn't that it didn't
look like a desktop. It was that it didn't behave like a desktop. It
had a background and a panel, but you couldn't put files or folders
on the background. In other words, when you right-clicked on the
desktop, there were no sub-menu entries for creating a folder,
creating a document, or pasting. We were shocked and thought it was a
bug, but not nearly as shocked as when we were told that they were
not only aware of it, but proud of it.

>However, it does fit Crunchbang, to pick one example.

It was Xubuntu. I don't remember which version.

>> Do you mean that you spread your desktop out over both monitors? If
>> so, I've never tried this. When I use multiple monitors, I have an
>> iteration of the desktop on each one.  
>
>Yes. It's the default on GNOME, Unity, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon and
>every other Linux desktop I have ever tried. On Windows it is the
>only way it can work.

On Windows, I use iterations of the desktop on each monitor rather
than spreading the desktop over the monitors.

>> Oh, no argument here from me. Ever. I wonder how I did without two
>> monitors as long as I did. It's definitely a liberating
>> experience.  
>
>You need to try Xinerama, then!

Oh, yes, definitely. Thanks. That's a keeper.

>> I did and it does work. I'm not a fan of it removing the text,
>> though, and just showing icons.  
>
>In Win8/8.1/10, choose "small icons" for the text to come back.

That worked.

>> I like to see a teaser of what I have open rather than just an
>> icon of the application it's open in.
>
>Hover over the button for that.

Definitely a work-flow disruptor and a show-stopper for someone like
me. I always have a ton of things open and need to tell at a glance,
very quickly, what's where. Being able to accomplish that only by
moving the mouse to one or more precise locations would be a
stumbling point for me.

>> I have a feeling I'll remain a horizontal panel person who will
>> add a vertical panel for some things, but not switch over
>> entirely.  
>
>Then you don't get the benefit of the extra space. So it's not worth
>it. It's all or nothing, I'm afraid.

Not necessarily. I've got plenty of room and am not feeling crunched.
I suppose, on a smaller monitor, it might be an issue, though, but
I'm not hurting for space.

>One thing that annoys me is that in the few Linux desktops that do
>support it, you have to mess around in multiple dialog boxes.
>
>On Windows, it's dead simple:
>[1] right-click taskbar
>[2] untick "locked"
>[3] drag to preferred edge
>
>Done.

It's two more steps in MATE:
[1] Right-click panel.
[2] Left-click "Properties".
[3] Left-click "Orientation" drop-down.
[4] Left-click one of the choices.
[5] Left-click "Close" button.

>When Linux makes stuff harder or more complex than on Windows, it has
>failed. There's no excuse.

As you pointed out in that article you linked to above, GNU/Linux is
created by a large variety of individuals from all walks of life. It
stands to reason that they have varying abilities or strengths, and,
as you also pointed out in that article, different tastes. I suspect
that a lot of the things we don't like about our operating systems
(or some of the software on them) are as a result of a developer
liking or not liking something and making a choice based on that.

I'm a firm believer in offering people choices instead of making
choices for them and I think that's what some of these developers
neglect to do. We don't all like the same things, as this
conversation shows, so it's nice when our software makes it possible
for each of us to make choices that result in a user experience we
consider to be just right.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.